SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 28, 2010 BookWorld SPORTS REVIEWBY SEANCALLAHAN
The cha-ching of hoop dreams
PLAY THEIR HEARTS OUT A Coach, His Star Recruit, and the Youth Basketball Machine By George Dohrmann Ballantine. 422 pp. $26
I TODD BIGELOW/SPORTS ILLUSTRATED/GETTY IMAGES
DemetriusWalker as an eighth-grader, playing in a California tournament.
n the cutthroat world of grassroots hoops — hypercompetitive club basketball for grade school and high school kids — Joe Keller had a regrettable reputation. As Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter George Dohrmann writes in “Play Their Hearts Out,” “he became a laughable legend: The man who discovered Tyson Chandler, a
once-in-a-lifetime talent, and then let [fellow grassroots coach Pat] Barrett steal him from right under his nose.” Dohrmann
chronicles
Keller’s attempt to redeem his reputation in the grassroots world — and to get rich while doing it. The book, a tour de force of reporting, filled with deft storytelling and vivid char- acter studies, focusesonKeller’s relationship with basketball phenom DemetriusWalker and the coach’s efforts to build a team capable of winning a youth basketball national championship. Keller discoveredWalker one
day in 2000 as the 9-year-old dominated a youth game. He became the boy’s coach—and a father figure. “Demetrius saw more of Keller each day than of his mother or any of his class- mates,” Dohrmann writes. “Demetrius is the best player his age in the
kids; he was in it for himself. When Dohrmann asked the coach what would happen if Walker never made it to theNBA,Keller responded: “Well, then all this would have been a waste of time. Demetrius would have been a bad investment.” For Keller, however, the investment eventually
paid off, no matter the long-term basketball pros- pects for Walker. In part because of Walker’s reputation,Keller secured an Adidas shoe contract for his team of grade-school-age kids, the first grassroots coach to do so for players so young. The five-year deal paid $60,000 the first year, with a $10,000 increase each of the following years. Askilled entrepreneur,Keller parlayed that deal
intoaneven bigger one: Adidas
Jr.PhenomCamps. These camps for sixth-, seventh- and eighth-grad- ers were his brainchild, and he estimated he could make a profit of more than $800,000 annually. Keller eventually left coach-
GEORGE DOHRMANN JoeKeller andWalker in 2006.
country,” Keller boasted. Eventually, swayed by Keller’s lobbying, Clark Francis, the editor of a newsletter called “The Hoop Scoop,” which rates grade school basketball players, calledWalker “the best6th grader in thenation.”Walker initially lived up to the hype, leading Keller’s team to the Amateur Athletic Union’s 13-and-under national championship in 2004. It was the peak of their partnership. While Keller is skilled at identifying young
talent — 20 of about 25 kids who played on his grassroots teams earned college scholarships—in Dohrmann’s telling, he isn’t exactly nurturing. “There had always been something worrisome about [Keller andWalker’s] bond—a coach who’d been no father to his own son, Joey, leaping into that role for one of his players — and a happy ending was never preordained,” Dohrmann writes. Keller, inDohrmann’s view, did not coach for the
ing to tend to the camps, just whenWalker seemed to need a father figure most. As the young player entered high school, thehypehadmadehim a target for other players look- ing to make a name for them- selves. Eventually, Walker cracked under the pressure. In 2006, at acampfor high school players looking to impress col- lege coaches, he refused to participate, hiding in a bath- room stall. He e-mailedKeller,whowas spending less and less time with him: “I don’t understand how you say I’mlike your son, but you aren’t there for me anymore.” Keller replied: “It’s
a shamewecan’t continue our relationship. I guess we have to go our separate ways.” Walker was struggling on the court. As a grade schooler, his height made him a great low-post player. But at6-foot-3,hewouldbe expected to play guard in college. To do so, he would have to improve his jump shot and ball handling, skills that Keller, a master recruiter but weak coach, never taught him. At 16,Walker was written off as washed up. But in the last, suspenseful pages of Dohrmann’s book, Walker tries to make a come- back—with no help from Keller. Keller now mentors his own 8-year-old son in
grassroots baseball. “I’m telling you, Jordan is the real deal,” he tells Dohrmann. “I’mtelling you,my son is a phenom.”
bookworld@washpost.com Sean Callahan is an editor at Crain Communications.
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HISTORY REVIEWBYFREDKAPLAN The emancipation of Honest Abe
laws must be respected until forces beyond his control gave him the oppor- tunity that he had done everything possible to avoid. From the start of his political career and up until about late 1862, he wanted only to prevent the spread of slavery, to look toward eventu- al emancipation through a change in public opinion, to solve the “Negro problem” by colonization (sponsoring emigration back to Africa) and to avoid bloodshed. What gives the book its major spurt of
THE FIERY TRIAL Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery By Eric Foner Norton. 426 pp. $29.95
T
he value of Eric Foner’s “The Fiery Trial” lies in its compre- hensive review of mostly fa- miliar material; in its sensible evaluation of the full range of
information already available about Abraham Lincoln and slavery; and in the deft thoroughness of its scholarship. “The Fiery Trial” does well what has already been done before “but ne’er so well expressed.” It’s an advantage, though, to have the record, and its uses and misuses, all in one place, and this willnowbe thebookof first convenience to go to on the
subject.Not surprisingly, its greatest strength is in context, not foreground. This follows from Foner’s belief that “the private Lincoln will forever remain elusive.” As Foner and most Lincoln scholars recognize, Lincoln’s moral position was clear from the start:He detested slavery. He had, though, a deep respect and absolute fealty to the Constitution, un- der which slavery was legal. He never changed his view that pro-slavery state
energy and freshness is its account of the complicated political and social con- text in which Lincoln’s views on slavery were formed and the large number of people and movements that helped cre- ate the dominant attitudes toward slav- ery in earlyandmid-19th-century Amer-
ica.The book “is intended to be both less and more than another biography,” Fon- er claims in his preface. Actually, it’s not a biography at all. It is different from a biography, and consequently neither “less” nor “more.” What “The Fiery Trial” does have in common with biography is that it is a chronological account of Lincoln and slavery. This has the advantage of giving it some forward pace but the disadvan- tages of repeatingwhat has already been done by numbers of estimable biogra- phers in less limited narratives of Lin- coln’s life, and of discouraging intellec- tual history and analysis. The book functions almost entirely as a narrative of Lincoln’s attitudes toward slavery as a politician, providing more surface than depth. Foner’s approach, though, is probably essential to his thesis: that “Lincoln’s career was a process of moral and political education and deepening anti-slavery conviction . . . that the hallmark of Lincoln’s greatness was his capacity for growth.” True? Probably not. Foner’s justification for
“The FieryTrial” is that “there is value in tracing Lincoln’s growth, as it were, forward.” “As it were” reveals a nice hesitancy or qualification that the book
as a whole doesn’t maintain. Foner’s basic claim is at least an exaggeration, if not wrong. A stronger argument can be made that Lincoln hardly “grew” at all on the issue of slavery, that he respond- ed to changing circumstances that he did not create and that broughthiminto a public role in which he could not avoid taking the positions that led to the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment. But Foner’s narrative almost requires that his main character develop morally. “TheFieryTrial” maintains this thesis
despite the facts that it narrates. And it may be that the paradigm of moral growth and its importance to Foner (and, of course, to others) precedes an examination of the
record.To give credit to Lincoln for moral progression seems beyond the facts and unnecessary for our appreciation of this arguably great- est of all American presidents. “The Fiery Trial” gives brief attention
ALAMY
Lincoln’s moral position was clear from the start:He detested slavery.
to Rep. John Quincy Adams’s prescrip- tion in the 1840s for overcoming the constitutional obstacle to legal emanci- pation. Adams believed that, since it would be impossible to attain the legis- lative votes for altering theConstitution, only the exercise of the president’s war powers, granted by the Constitution, could eliminate slavery. Adams predict- ed that would happen. Did Lincoln, who was on the House floor in 1848 when Adams collapsed and who was appoint- ed to the funeral committee, read or even know of Adams’s speeches before they were brought to his attention in 1861? It was, in effect, not Lincoln but the Confederate South that initiated emancipation, as Adams anticipated. It did so by seceding, which Lincoln calcu- latingly labeled “rebellion.”That activat- ed his war powers as president. The rest is history, “as it were.”
bookworld@washpost.com
Fred Kaplan is the author, most recently, of “Lincoln: The Biography of aWriter.”
MEMOIR
FULL FRONTAL NUDITY The Making of an Accidental Actor By Harry Hamlin Scribner. 275 pp. $24
We know Harry Hamlin is a heartthrob
(the authority on these matters, People magazine, named him “Sexiest Man Alive” in 1987), but who knew the man famous for playing an attorney on “L.A. Law” was such a scofflaw? His “sordid life of crime” began at the tender age of 4, when he routinely went outside the house to pee in the food bowl meant for the family’s Dalmatian. Then, in the fourth grade, he was kicked out of school for writing a book report on “Mein Kampf.” Later, while studying theater at UC- Berkeley, he was busted for possessing drugs at San Francisco’s airport. He spent several days in jail, where he was assigned toilet-cleaning duty. His fellow inmates would miss the bowl on purpose. Hamlin’s frustrations with his genitals
bookend “Full Frontal Nudity.” It opens on an awkward bathroom encounter with a nursery school teacher that leaves him disturbed and insecure. It ends with him taking a role in “Equus,” a play requiring him to drop trou and put his insecurities on full display night after night. This is a hormonal coming-of-age story. Hamlin rarely talks about his wife, ex-
wives or fatherhood. He doesn’t reflect on the craft of acting. The words “L.A. Law” never appear. Instead, his focus is his college years, and he only serves up stories about the good stuff: sex, drugs and the friendships that helped to define him as an adult. Like an out-of-the-blue e- mail from an old buddy who wants to fill you in on all the crazy stuff he’s been up to, “Full Frontal Nudity” is irresistible, funny and surprisingly affecting. —Stephen Lowman
lowmans@washpost.com
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